DEV Community: Jessica Woudsma

Flex vs Grid

Jessica Woudsma — Sun, 01 Aug 2021 00:53:19 +0000

I am a cat person. I am not against dogs. There are times I even enjoy them. But given the chance, I would always choose the cat over the dog.

That's how I have been treating CSS Flexbox.

It has been the cat that I kept on choosing.

But today. I had to choose the dog. And you know what? CSS Grid was not going to fight with me like Flexbox was. It was pretty compliant, actually. It's like it wanted to make me happy.

Just here to say that sometimes, circumstances are just better suited to having a dog than a cat.

Photo by Yan Laurichesse on Unsplash

First Udemy Certificate!

Jessica Woudsma — Sat, 31 Jul 2021 00:44:54 +0000

True, it is just a 3.5 hour course, but I've suspected a lot of us have fallen down the Udemy rabbit hole. It looks like I'm at about a 30-38% average completion rate, so hitting that 100% was a little more exciting than I realized it would be :)

The course I completed was Creating Accessible Websites by Stefany Newman. Why did I chose that one? Can't quite recall. Would I choose this one again? Can't quite answer that, either. But it's not because it wasn't good. I just truly don't have much to compare it to at this early stage of my accessibility learning.

Not long ago, I was able to chat with an accessibility auditor, and one of the main points I came away with is that making accessible tech can include interpretation at times. There are a lot of guidelines. That doesn't make them hard and fast rules everywhere 100% of the time. But a person has to start somewhere! And that is what I am doing.

Taking this course makes me want to learn more. I want to see where those guidelines tend to fall given various circumstances. If much bias might even exist within areas of the field (bias likely exists everywhere, right?)

This course made me excited to learn more. To figure out how to get the screen reader to pronounce my first name in english and my last name in dutch (even though according to how I understand the rules of english, the screen reader is still somehow messing up). I would like to figure out how to add alt text to the image of the gray and white rabbit at the top of this screen!

Ultimately, I would like to say, thank you, Stefany Newman, for making me even more excited about learning about accessibility.

Photo by Gavin Allanwood on Unsplash

little a11y steps (pt. 1)

Jessica Woudsma — Sat, 10 Jul 2021 02:22:00 +0000

Why "a11y"?

Software engineering will use numeronyms for abbreviations. The "11" replaces the number of letters found between "a" and "y" in the word "accessibility".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numeronym

Finally Got The Autocomplete

Jessica Woudsma — Mon, 28 Jun 2021 22:24:22 +0000

In my post-bootcamp haze, it registered in my brain that zsh came on the stage as the default shell for Apple(1). My MacBook Air, in all of it's glory, had been giving me such a confidence boost every time I was in the Terminal.

"cd and ls- that's the safest thing I can do in the Terminal and still feel kind of like I might appear to know what I am doing" and I could look for my files in what felt to be an organizational structure at the time.

But that tab key. It would autofill! Save me from unneeded typing! And soul-crushing mistakes! I hit quite a mistake high score with my React solo project, doing things like getting my props and state mixed up because I couldn't begin to tell you what the difference was(2).

Once I came to, and started to create projects again, I realized the autocomplete was no longer. Luckily, I did not run the "you are a terrible, horrible, no good very bad developer"(3) speech like I have in the past, but instead, I just figured "well I will benefit from typing things out and paying attention to detail."

Which is a noble way of being lazy in solving a problem, I suppose.

But today, TODAY, it was the day. Autocomplete.

After a few googles, and a few "omg what if this is fake code and it will give me eternal blue screen of death", I decided that 1) I will have zsh, not bash, as my default, since it is an option, and 2) to use the following two lines:

echo 'autoload -Uz compinit && compinit' >> ~/.zshrc
source ~/.zshrc

A quick restart of my shell, and oooh boy, look who is tabbing all over the Terminal?!

Yep. It's me.

And now it can be you, too, if you have also been silly this whole time. And have a Mac. And would like zsh to be your default shell.

(1) macOS 10.15 Catalina release in on June 3, 2019 https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/06/apple-previews-macos-catalina/

(2) Kent C Dodd puts it well in the following: "What's the difference between props and state in React? ... 'props' (short for 'properties') is an object of arbitrary inputs a React function component accepts as the first argument. 'state' is data that changes over the lifetime of a specific instance of a React component." https://kentcdodds.com/blog/props-vs-state

(3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_and_the_Terrible,_Horrible,_No_Good,_Very_Bad_Day